Listen to a podcast featuring anti-poverty experts Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd, as well as Half in Ten Campaign Manager Melissa Boteach.

View the slides presented by Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd at the April 9 briefing.

Beth Mattingly of the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, whose research focuses on the well-being of women, children, and families, revealed on the rural face of poverty. Mattingly explained that the need for transportation and child care present major challenges for many rural workers and families. In fact, rural poor families spend as much as a third of their income on child care. When child care costs are coupled with the expense of maintaining a car in communities that lack public transportation, many low-wage jobs simply do not provide adequate pay.

Elizabeth Kneebone, the senior research analyst for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, also emphasized the importance of transportation in developing solutions to suburban poverty. The number of suburban poor is growing at an alarming rate: since 2002, there has been about a 25% increase in the number of suburban poor, a figure which outpaces national growth as well as the increase in any other type of community. To combat the growing issue of suburban poverty, Kneebone stressed the need for innovative policy that considers the issues of transit, housing, and job creation. It is imperative to think about where and how people actually live and work so that policy makers can develop regional policy solutions that assist individuals, families, and the community as a whole.

Daniel Dodd of Step Up Savannah, who pioneered a program to reduce poverty in the urban setting of Savannah, Georgia, also addressed the need for long-term, big-picture solutions to fight poverty in ways that involve the broader community. Dodd explained how he has made significant progress by framing poverty as an economic issue and thereby involving organizations, corporations, and business interests in anti-poverty efforts. In Dodd’s own words, “Poverty is a business issue as much as it is a human issue.” Especially in urban communities, doing what’s right may depend on making it clear to all members of the community that fighting poverty is in their own best interests.

The Half in Ten Campaign’s briefing revealed that combating poverty is a national challenge and that greater recognition of the unique characteristics of each region is needed to develop anti-poverty policy solutions. Fighting poverty across rural, suburban, and urban districts requires federal leadership to pave the way for dynamic, innovative, place-based strategies that allow for economic recovery and opportunity for residents of every type of community.

Listen to a podcast featuring anti-poverty experts Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd, as well as Half in Ten Campaign Manager Melissa Boteach.

View the slides presented by Beth Mattingly, Elizabeth Kneebone, and Daniel Dodd at the April 9 briefing.

Congress listened to advocates, and included unemployment reform in ARRA, allocating $7 billion for the project. And these reforms have begun to reach unemployed workers across the country.  Earlier this week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report (PDF) detailing the “unprecedented wave” of unemployment insurance reforms that has swept across the country since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) became law on February 17th, 2009.  

In just four months, 25 states have enacted reforms to modernize and expand their unemployment insurance programs, either by considering a worker’s most recent work history and earnings to determine their qualification for UI benefits or specifically offering unemployment benefits to historically-disadvantaged employees, such as women, part-time workers, and the long term unemployed. The states that made these reforms were Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and West Virginia. These states joined the 8 states and the District of Columbia that had already made these reforms.

In addition to permanent UI reform, 21 states with high unemployment rates have also extended unemployment benefits to cover an extra 13-20 weeks.  Of the $7 billion in federal incentive funds, the NELP report estimates that $3.65 billion will be provided to the states in order to help over one million jobless workers collect the benefits they need.

Catherine Rampell, the economics editor of nytimes.com, emphasizes that most of these state unemployment insurance reforms are new changes that indeed expand program eligibility, as opposed to “technical ‘fixes’ to existing laws.” The NELP report further highlights the broad bi-partisan support of these reforms, indicating that legislation has been signed and enacted by nine Republican governors. About a dozen states are still in debate over reforms.